To much of the scholarly world, Cornelius Castoriadis (1922-1997) remains a relatively peripheral, when not altogether unknown, thinker. Castoriadis was a Greek-French psychoanalyst, philosopher, economist, and social critic who helped to found the libertarian-socialist group and journal, "Socialisme ou Barbarie." Some of his work, including the first part of his main work, L'institution imaginaire de la société, was quite early translated into the Scandinavian languages, in some cases before their translation into English and French. This explains why his innovative ideas have been embraced primarily by scholars in the northern regions of the European and Icelandic world. This neglect of a fine scholar and thinker is truly regrettable, because his distinctive, radical reflections on the political, social, and economic phenomena of the modern world, from democracy to autonomy to rationality, creativity, and human subjectivity, offer to modern scholars a new and fruitful way of approaching the spectrum of political and social justice problems that face the world in this era of late capitalism.

Castoriadis' philosophy challenges the facile neoliberal ideology that links capitalism with ideals of freedom, equality, and democracy--ideals rendered ludicrous by the actual effects of global capitalism with the degraded forms of "freedom" (freedom to conform, freedom to consume) realized within modern plutocracies, and by the gross mal-distribution of wealth that renders the benefits of those societies inaccessible to the vast number of citizens. This is why it is of great importance and a cause for general celebration that a dedicated network of Nordic scholars, supported by the Nordic Summer University, has been focusing upon this important thinker over the past decade. They convened to collaborate their investigations and analyses of his work from 2007 through 2009, meeting in a variety of venues, from Paris to Stockholm to Akureyri to Athens. These collaborations, deliberations, and exchanges shed new light on Castoriadis' oeuvre and drew scholars from around the globe. As a result of these collaborations, Castoriadis' innovative ideas are finally being brought into the spotlight of the general philosophical community in the newly published volume Creation, Rationality and Autonomy: Essays on Cornelius Castoriadis.

The three themes by which the book is titled are key themes, original categories, around which Castoriadis, "a radical leftist, thinking beyond both Marxism and anarchism" (p. 11), organizes his critique of modernity and gestures toward solutions to the paradoxes and impasses of modern capitalism. Drawing into communion classical philosophical ideas, psychoanalytical insights, and social constructionist theory, Castoriadis opens new avenues for thinking about where we are and for plotting our way through to truer democratic forms. Much has already been written across the social sciences, biology, and philosophy about the "constructed" nature of social historical reality, but Castoriadis takes this investigation many steps beyond the mere naïve description of the phenomenal structure of lifeworlds, inquiring into the fullest implications of the fact that what we know as reality is a created reality. That reality arises in human minds as always already logically organized--meaning-full--and that phenomena are always already structured into an ordered, coherent "world" must then comprise the launching point of all further philosophical inquiry. The social historical world must be investigated on its own terms, rather than in terms of some other fictional grounding criterion, such as "human nature" or "market forces," social function, or other constructs.

The fact that the social historical world is a humanly created reality does not place in question the empirical reality of the world, its independent existence outside the human mind and the lived experience of subjects. Rather, it throws into question the "how" of that existence and the nature of our fabricated constructions and highlights the fragility of its organizational framework. This approach constitutes a radically bold new investigation, which threatens the very sense we make of world, but taking very seriously the constructed nature of social historical reality also opens broadly and profoundly a space for hopefulness regarding the many seemingly inevitable and irresolvable problems that characterize the modern era and magnifies the conceptual arena for rethinking that created reality. Created reality, such as it is at any moment organized, can always be recreated. In other words, how we understand the world, this specific representation of this specific social historical reality, can always be reinvented, organized differently. In consonance with the ancient Buddhist dharma, we come to better appreciate that our labels and concepts, judgments and "truths," like all nouns, are mere linguistic conveniences. The reality is that of process; everything is verb. "This [our current] ontological conception transgresses the crude subjective-objective divide that informs the most part of the Western philosophical tradition" (p. 11). This insight grounds one of the most original, compelling, and inspiring bodies of work to emerge in the past fifty years.

The Scandinavian countries themselves have long been celebrated by thinking people around the globe as a beacon of the highest human ideals of egalitarianism and living, open-ended, active democracy, because its citizens constantly challenge their own established authorities and institutions. In these times of shameless extremes of wealth alongside shameful extremes of poverty, the Nordic nations remain, with Japan and Canada, examples of truer democracies, with the narrowest differentials in income and the most laudable penury of those social and medical problems always found to accompany extreme differentials in wealth--drug abuse, crime, teen pregnancy, incarceration rates, etc. Other nations, such as the United States, the United Kingdom, and China, may appear to be "richer" (by narrow definitions of wealth as mere profit-making), but the Nordic countries enjoy much greater rates of trust among fellow citizens and greater confidence in their institutions to serve the common good broadly and effectively.

More recently, however, the Nordic lands have found themselves increasingly under pressure to conform to the neoliberal policies that flood the globe in modernity, promising prosperity and democracy to those who play along with the trends and practices of global commerce. Most notably Sweden has succumbed to these pressures. However, the pressures of late global capitalism have simultaneously stimulated renewed philosophical reflection across these Nordic lands. The volume, Creation, Rationality and Autonomy, is a rich example of the burgeoning philosophical activity that challenges current mythologies of power. I shall highlight here but a few of the many fine papers collected in this volume, each one of which, selected from the fruitful discourses that emerged over these years of collaborations, offers valuable insights into the problems of modernity and makes a valuable and original contribution to the general understanding of the three themes (creation, rationality, and democracy) delineated in the oeuvre of Castoriadis.

Angelos Mouzakitis unfolds Castoriadis' concept of creation, as it developed in his engagement with the ancient Greek experience of the world and especially the pre-Socratic philosophers. Mousakitis shows how Castoriadis extends this re-questioning beyond the by-now familiar engagement with these early philosophical texts that we find in Martin Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer, who merely seek to unearth the "primordial meanings" of these early philosophical texts. What Mousakitis finds original in Castoriadis' reading of early Greek philosophy is his focus on the relationship between chaos and creation, and his resultant discovery of the lingering presence of chaos in ancient cosmology. Castoriadis' concept of creation ex nihilo, as a critical aspect of democratic politics, grows out of this discovery. Regarding the theme of rationality, Castoriadis' understanding of rationality comes quite close to Socrates' definition of "human wisdom" as the wisdom of skepticism, or the wisdom that appreciates that certain knowledge is beyond the rational capacity of mere human beings. Reason, for Castoriadis as for Socrates, is the philosophical project of endless questioning. This definition lays the philosophical groundwork for Castoriadis' mockery of the modern myth of "history as progress" that grounds the ludicrous postulation that the status quo represents the most "rational" or "axiomatic" state of affairs. In faithfulness to the tradition of Max Weber, whom Castoriadis greatly admired, Castoriadis recognizes that reason is a constitutive aspect of the modern experience of the world and a primary signification in its social imaginary.

For me, the highlight of this volume is the study by Italian-Icelandic scholar, Giorgio Baruchello of the University of Akureyri, "Odd Bedfellows: Cornelius Castoriadis on Capitalism and Democracy." Baruchello's brilliant study unfolds the history of the philosophical roots of capitalism, a genealogy that starkly exposes the ironies of the pivotal neoliberal myth, the wildly inaccurate myth that capitalism actively promotes democracy and freedom. That myth, propounded most recently by Milton Friedman in his 1962 book, Capitalism and Freedom, has been heralded the world over by political and business leaders and pedaled to effect a spectrum of enormous harms to individuals, families, and struggling nations by rationalizing welfare slashing, invasions of foreign countries, tyranny, oppression, and exploitation of peoples and nations around the globe. Baruchello shows that the link between capitalism and democracy was only ever an early marriage of convenience that culminated in a quick divorce, as soon as the latter failed to serve the former's primary goal--the increase of profits.

In the section on Autonomy, Harald Wolf's "The Power of the Imaginary" carefully unfolds a careful analysis of Castoriadis' unique understanding of the concept of power. In this chapter, Wolf compares Castoriadis' concept of power to other well-known theories, such as those of Michel Foucault, Max Weber, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Martin Heidegger, arguing the greater capacity of Castoriadis' definition of the "infrapower" of the social imaginary to create the "instituted" society that allows for the emergence of truly democratic politics and the actualization of autonomy, as Castoriadis understands these ideas. Wolf argues that Castoriadis' distinction between "instituted" and "instituting" society allows for a greater political opening for the exercise of autonomy.

Creation, Rationality and Autonomy is a work greatly needed for bringing the ideas of a very promising thinker to the forefront of philosophical discourse where it truly deserves to stand as a radical rethinking of politics and democracy today, highlighting the power of individuals to actively engage with others to reconstruct the social historical reality that hardens around them as self-evidently inevitable and "the best of all possible worlds." I highly recommend this book to scholars in the field of philosophy and political theory. It is suitable and accessible for use in graduate studies. The piece by Baruchello should be compulsory reading in every senior level Ethics class. However, this work should not be left to scholars. The critical challenges it poses to our general conceptions of world, democracy, politics, justice, and freedom would benefit every thinking citizen of the global community.

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